Tag Archives: paintings

Narrative art in the round at London’s Barbican Centre

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THE CURVE AT London’s Barbican Centre is as its name suggests, a curved space. When the Centre was built, the Curve was designed as a space to act as a sound barrier or buffer to contain the sounds emanating from the concert hall that it surrounds. Nowadays, it is used as a space for temporary exhibitions. Until the 5th of January 2025, the Curve will contain an exhibition, “It will end in tears”, of paintings Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, who was born in Botswana in 1980.

Ms Sunstrum’s paintings are on grainy wooden panels, and are truly wonderfully executed. The series of paintings are all linked by a narrative – an imagined story of a woman who lands in a colonial country in Africa in the early to mid-20th century, and has an adventure that ends up with a court case. For this exhibition, the Curve has been divided by wooden partitions into a series of rooms, connected to each other by an elevated walkway. Each room is designed to resemble a different stage set. For example. one is a kitchen. and another is a courtroom. The viewer walks along the walkway from room to room, seeing the series of paintings arranged in the order that the story unfolds. The heroine of the story is an imagined woman named Bettina. The artist created Bettina in her own image – each depiction of Bettina is the artist’s self-portrait. The resulting set of pictures along with the wooden partitions makes for an enjoyable and intriguing experience.

The paintings are like ‘stills’ from a movie. Although their style and subject matter is completely different, I was reminded of series of paintings such as those by Vittore Carpaccio (c1460-c1525) in Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni (in Venice), which show scenes from a legend with a Christian religious theme.

Ms Sunstrum’s site-specific exhibition at the Curve is what the series of guidebooks issued by the Michelin tyre company would describe as “vaut la détour” (‘worth the detour’).

Dragons in Mayfair and an artist from Pakistan

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ONE GREY SEPTEMBER afternoon, we stepped into the Almine Rech gallery in London’s Mayfair a few days before its wonderful exhibition of paintings, “Summer of Dragons”, by Hiba Shahbaz was due to end (on the 28th of September 2024). Each of the works on display depict dragons, and some of them also include human figures, often scantily dressed.

Hiba was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied Indo-Persian miniature painting in Lahore’s National College of Art. Then, she studied in the USA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (New York City), where she was awarded her Master of Fine Arts degree. She now lives and works in the USA.

The skills she gained while training to paint Indo-Persian miniatures can be seen in the much larger paintings, which are on display at Almine Rech. Some of the paintings evoked memories of Chinese or Japanese art. Others depict dragons in the company of naked women. All the paintings, including some wooden boxes decorated with paintings, were completed in 2024. I suspect that had she remained in Pakistan and produced the same images, those containing the nudes might have been severely frowned upon.

We left the gallery, feeling very satisfied with what we had seen. Although the clouds above us had become more threatening, the visual experience of the exhibition brightened our moods.

About Space at an exhibition in a gallery in south London’s Bermondsey

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THE TROUBLE WITH temporary exhibitions is that they come to an end. So, if you miss it, you might never see the same works of art together again. I am very pleased that we just managed to catch a superb exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey on its final day (1st of September 2024). Called “About Space”, it is a show of paintings by an artist, of whom I had not come across before: Al Held (1928-2005).

Al Held was born in Brooklyn (NYC). His Jewish family was impoverished during the Great Depression and had to survive on welfare payments.  Having served in the US forces during WW2, he was eligible (under the terms of the GI Bill) for financial assistance with his education after the war. He studied painting first in New York City, and then in Paris (France). Over the years, he explored different styles of painting, and after exhibiting at major art museums in the USA, his work began to be shown at prestigious galleries outside the USA.

The paintings on display at the White Cube date from the 1960s onwards. Many of them are huge, dwarfing the viewers. A few are smaller. All of them are visually spectacular. Although two-dimensional, they depict complex three-dimensional abstract imaginary constructions. Viewing these amazing compositions is like looking through a huge window at the kind of fantastical geometric abstracted landscapes that might now be produced by digital means. As the title of the exhibition implies, Held’s paintings are literally about space. Painted with precision, these compositions explode with energy.

I am glad that we did not miss the exciting experience of seeing these paintings created by a man, who had shown no interest in art until he left the US Navy in 1947. It was his friend the artist Nicholas Krushenick (1929 – 1999), who inspired him to take up art, and I am very pleased that he did.

Paintings and the Olympic Games in Paris in Cambridge

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MY INTEREST IN the Olympic Games is limited, but that did not stop me from visiting the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where an exhibition is being held to celebrate the 1924 Olympic Games, which were held in Paris. The exhibition, “Paris 1924: Sport, Art, and the Body”, is on until the 3rd of November 2024. Paris was, and still is, an appropriate place to hold the Olympic Games, because the man who revived this ancient Greek festival of sport, Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), was born in that city. The exhibition is well laid-out. Naturally, it contains many items of interest to enthusiasts of sport and the Olympic Games. Most of these are relevant to the 1924 Paris event, which was held only 10 years after the outbreak of WW1. The exhibits which interested me most were some of the paintings.

The Paris Olympics of 1924 took place during an exciting era of artistic experimentation and development. Most of the paintings in the exhibition provide evidence of that exciting period of twentieth century art. There is a painting of a gymnast by the German artist George Grosz (1893-1959), which was painted in about 1922. Works by the Italian Futurists Gino Severini (1883-1966), Enzo Benedetti (1905-1993), and Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), figure in the exhibition. There is also a painting by Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957), who was a brother of the famous poet William Butler Yeats. An interesting almost Cubist painting of a tennis player caught my eye. It was created in 1917 by an artist I had not heard of: André Lhote (1885-1962). A modernistic portrayal of a female runner by Willi Baumeister (1889-1955) fitted in well with the theme of the exhibition.

The paintings and sculptures chosen for the show were what made the exhibition enjoyable for me. One painting amongst them was for me the greatest surprise. It is a huge portrait depicting the face of the tennis player Mrs Helen Wills Moody (1905-1998), created in pastels in 1930. She had won two gold medals in the Olympics of 1924. I do not know why, but it was with great surprise that I saw that the artist was the Mexican Diego Riviera (1886-1957). Although the portrait is large, I had always associated Riviera with huge murals, rather than portraits and smaller paintings, of which, I have recently discovered, he created many.

I am pleased that I have seen the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam not because it has increased my interest in the Olympic Games, but because it included some fine paintings, which I had not seen before.

A visitor from Persia in a house in Sussex

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PETWORTH HOUSE IN West Sussex is a huge palace maintained by the National Trust. It contains an unbelievably remarkable collection of old master paintings, including many by Joshua Reynolds, JMW Turner, and Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641). The paintings and many sculptures were collected by the 3rd Earl of Egremont, George O’Brien Wyndham (1751–1837), who was a patron of JMW Turner and John Constable, both of whom were regular visitors at Petworth House. When we visited the house in August (2024), we saw the paintings by Turner, but did not notice any by Constable. A full list of the paintings in Petworth is listed at: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings/Collection/Petworth_House .

While viewing the overwhelmingly splendid artworks at Petworth, a pair of paintings by Van Dyck intrigued me. Painted in 1622, one depicts Sir Robert Shirley (1581-1628), and the other his wife Lady Theresia Shirley (1589-1668). They are fine portraits, but what interested me was the lives of these two people.

The Safavid dynasty ruled Persia from 1501 until 1736. In 1598, Robert Shirley travelled to Safavid Persia with his brother Anthony to train the Shah’s army in the military techniques used by the English army. It is not clear who put the idea of visiting Persia into the minds of the Shirleys. One suggestion is that it was mooted by the Venetians. The modernisation of the military supervised by the Shirley brothers improved the fighting ability of the Persian army to such an extent that they were able to score a great victory in a war between the Safavids and their Ottoman neighbours in 1612.  After Anthony left Persia (in about 1600), Robert stayed behind with 14 other Englishmen. In 1607, he married Sampsonia, whose portrait by Van Dyck hangs in Petworth. She was a Christian lady born into the Circassian nobility of Safavid Persia. After being baptised, she added the name Teresia to her own name, and became known as Lady Teresia Sampsonia Shirley.

The Safavid Shah Abbas (ruled 1587-1629) sent Robert to England in 1608 to encourage King James I to join a confederacy against the Ottoman Empire. While in Europe, Robert visited other rulers for the same reason. Between 1609 and 1613, he lived in Spain. His wife travelled from Persia to join him there.  Between 1613 and 1615, Robert was back in Persia. Then, he returned to Europe, and resided in Spain.

It was in Rome in 1622 that Van Dyck painted the portraits of Sir Robert and Lady Teresia now hanging in Petworth. They were dressed in lavish Persian clothes. It has been suggested that these ‘exotic’ outfits attracted Van Dyck, but by 1622 this couple were already sufficiently celebrated to be worthy of the artist’s attention regardless of how they were attired.  

Shirley’s final visit to Persia was in 1627, when he accompanied Sir Dodmore Cotton – England’s first ambassador to Persia. However, soon after arriving there, he died in Qazvin (now in northwest Iran). His wife took his remains to Rome in 1658. She retired to a convent in that city, and lived there until her death.

I have discussed only two of the multitude of paintings at Petworth. Most of the others we saw there were not only by great masters, but also worthy of study. Although the design of the rooms in Petworth is not as spectacular as in many other stately homes, the collection within it deserves a leisurely visit. And as there is so much to see in the way of artworks, the visitor should plan to spend several hours there. We were there for three hours and that was hardly long enough.

The artist Mark Rothko in Cornwall

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MANY PEOPLE MEDITATE profoundly in front of paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970). I am not one of those people. I can recognise his work and appreciate its originality, but he is not amongst my favourite 20th century artists.

When visiting the branch of the Tate Gallery in Cornwall’s St Ives at the beginning of July 2024, I viewed a small exhibition of painted panels created by Rothko. In 1958, he was commissioned to paint them for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York City. In the summer of 1959, he took a break from painting this series of pictures, and visited England. The painter Peter Lanyon invited Rothko to his home in St Ives in Cornwall. During his stay, he met other artists based in the West Country including Alan Davie, Paul Feiler, Patrick Heron, and Terry Frost. Rothko’s visit to St Ives was a factor that helped change his mind about displaying the paintings he was creating for the Four Seasons restaurant. It has been recorded that he said that the restaurant was:

“… a place where the richest bastards of New York will come to feed and show off.” (theartnewspaper.com, 4th of April 2024).

In 1969, Rothko donated nine of the paintings, originally destined for the restaurant, to the Tate Gallery. Seven others can be viewed at the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art in Japan, and another thirteen are housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The rest are owned by his children.

Usually, the paintings currently being displayed at the Tate in St Ives are to be found in a dedicated room in London’s Tate Modern. Currently, the room where they are usually stored in Tate Modern is being used to host an exhibition by another artist (Joan Mitchell). The Seagram murals will remain in St Ives until January 2025.

We visit St Ives regularly. Its branch of the Tate is one of several artistic attractions we visit in the town. Although it contains some great artworks, I am not fond of its architecture. I am glad we visited again because had we not done so, I would not have known about Rothko’s holiday in St Ives, and the influence it had on his decision not to display his paintings in a fancy restaurant in New York City.

Inverted images by an artist born in Germany at a gallery in London

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CERTAIN IMAGES IMMEDIATELY come to mind when the names of some artists are mentioned. For Vincent Van Gogh it is sunflowers; for Claude Monet it is waterlilies; for Salvador Dali it is melting clocks; and for Edvard Munch it is “The Scream”. In the case of the German artist Georg Baselitz (born as ‘Hans-Georg Kern’ in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany in1938), mentioning his name conjures up inverted images: paintings in which the images appear to be upside down. He signs them with his signature, but it is not upside down.

Recently, we viewed an exhibition of this octogenarian’s latest paintings at the White Cube Gallery in London’s Bermondsey Street. The show is on until the 16th of June 2024. If you miss it, you will not have missed much worth seeing. As you can tell, I was not over-impressed by what I saw, but it did get me thinking about why the artist often chooses to paint his subjects – human and others – upside down.

Does he choose to do this because his childhood in Germany was spent in a country that had been turned upside down by the Nazi regime, the 2nd World War, and its immediate aftermath in the early years of the German Democratic Republic? The White Cube website quotes the artist as having said:

“I’ve got my early childhood drawings of eagles, stags, deer, dogs and so on in folders,’ Baselitz remarks. ‘Every now and then I look at them, and I think was it a good time, was it a bad time?”

Or does he paint his images upside down to attract the viewer – to make his artwork ‘stand out from the crowd’? Alternatively, does he invert his images so that the viewer is forced to consider not only the subject matter, but also his painting techniques (brush strokes, colour choices, and so on)?

I do not know the answers to these questions. However, I am glad I have seen the exhibition, which did not particularly thrill me, because it did stimulate me to consider his art a little more that I had expected.

Women with many heads on canvases at an art gallery in central London

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TODAY, WE VIEWED an exhibition of paintings by an artist born in India, who spent most of her life in the British Isles. The artist is Gurminder Sikand (1960-2021), who was born in Jamshedpur, but moved to the Rhondda Valley in South Wales with her parents in 1970. Her artistic training was first at the Cardiff College of Art and Design (in 1979-80) and then at the City of Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University), where she was awarded a fine art degree. In 1983, she and her husband moved to Nottingham. Her work began to attract wide attention after one of her pieces was selected as the winner of the East Midlands Art Prize by the South African artist Gavin Jantjes.

In an obituary written by her husband, published in thegauardian.com on the 14th of February 2022, it was noted that her work:

“… was characterised by images of strong women. This was true of her many self-portraits, her paintings influenced by Indian folk art, her watercolours of women hugging trees (inspired by the Chipko anti-deforestation movement), and latterly her drawings of muscular female figures whose physiques reflected Gurminder’s workouts at her city-centre gym in Nottingham.”

The paintings we saw today (22nd of May 2024) at the Maximillian William gallery in London’s Fitzrovia were some of Gurminder’s earlier works, created between 1986 and 1992. Most of the 19 works include depictions of women. All of them are slightly mysterious, but also eye-catching. Many of them include women with several heads. I wondered whether in creating these she was thinking about Hindu deities that are often shown as having many arms. As far as I am aware few, if any, Hindu deities are shown in images as having more than one head, but seeing Gurminder’s women with many heads made me think about the multi-limbed deities in Hindu imagery.

Trees also figure prominently in many of the paintings we saw. Regarding this and her painting style, the gallery’s press release has this to say:

“Images of women drawn from Indian mythology recur throughout Sikand’s work. Her interest in the figure of the goddess – particularly the Hindu goddess Kali, who both destroys and creates the world anew, and is often pictured with a garland of human heads – is evident in her depictions of women metamorphosing into nature. In Sikand’s paintings, women are seeds buried in soil, hang on tree branches to provide shelter, or are even the earth and sky themselves. These amorphous relationships between the figure and nature were further inspired by the Chipko environmental movement, which began in north India during the 1970s, when villagers – mostly women – embraced trees at risk of deforestation, a protest that also highlighted their primary role as caregivers. Sikand’s female figures are often portrayed as strong: appearing resolute with multiple heads or acting as protectors over her landscapes.”

Although Gurminder left India when she was only 10 years old, and was then immersed in British life, culture, and education, her Indian heritage never deserted her, and is expressed in her wonderful paintings. I enjoyed viewing this well-displayed exhibition, and I recommend seeing it before it ends on the 29th of June 2024.

Exploring some unknowns in London’s fashionable Mayfair

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I HAVE NO IDEA how many commercial art galleries there are in Central London. Today (the 14th of May 2024), we visited an art gallery, whose existence was previously unknown to us, and there we saw an exhibition of works by an artist, who was also new to us. The gallery is Carl Kostyal in Savile Row. Its discreet entrance is sandwiched between two fashionable tailors’ stores. Half Hungarian and half Swedish, Carl Kostyál opened his gallery in Savile Row in 2010. Three years later, he opened another gallery in Stockholm.

The artist, whose work is being exhibited, is Leo Park, who was born in Sweden in 1980. His exhibition in Savile Row is called “Beyond Pleasure”. It consists mostly of large paintings, but also a wall covered with a mosaic of small sketches, The beautifully executed artworks are eye-catching, and reminded me a little of the works of some of the pre-WW2 Surrealists. The paintings and sketches are of imagined forms that immediately made me think of human bodies. The images are clearly meant to evoke such thoughts, but looked at objectively, they are all shapes that do not exist in nature. The paintings and drawings are all displayed in the beautifully restored rooms of the 18th century building that houses the gallery.

The show ends on the 2nd of June 2024, and is well worth visiting.

Paintings by artists in India who escaped from western European artistic traditions – at the Brunei Gallery

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WHENEVER I VISITED my in-laws in India, I used to admire the painting by the Bengali artist Jamini Roy (1887-1972), which used to hang in their flat. His style of painting was both modern (20th century) and at the same time almost folkloric. When our friend Bob Annibale posted on Facebook about an exhibition at the Brunei Gallery (in London’s Bloomsbury) that included Roy’s works, we could not resist visiting it, and we were glad we viewed it.

The exhibition, which continues until the 22nd of June 2024, not only contains a good selection of Roy’s works, but also others by Bengali artists working mainly between the late 19th century and the 1950s. Apart from works by Roy’s contemporaries including various members of the Tagore family, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Nandalal Bose, and Qamrul Hassan, there were also paintings by lesser-known or unknown artists who painted in the traditional late 19th century Bengali (Kalighat) style, rather than in experimental styles of the 20th century.

The emergence of modern Indian painting was a consequence of the establishment of The Government College of Art in Calcutta (in 1854). As the website of the Brunei Gallery explained, it was:

“… established by a benevolent government for the purpose of revealing to the Indians the superiority of European art.”

In the late 19th century, Indian artists working in the college began questioning the validity of Indians painting in the alien Western European fashion that was being taught them. The gallery’s website continued:

“Academic art, introduced by the British Raj, was challenged by the nationalist art movement, the Bengal School of painting, led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951) and his disciples who dominated the art scene in the first decades of the twentieth century.”

It is works by these artists, who used their creations as part of their expressions of desire to see India free of British rule, that form the greater part of the show at the Brunei.

Several things particularly interested me whilst viewing the excellently curated and displayed exhibition. One was three paintings by Jamini Roy that illustrate Christian themes (e.g., the Crucifixion, the Last Supper, and the Flight to Egypt). I had not before seen any of Roy’s paintings depicting Christian stories.  Another exciting discovery for me were a selection of paintings by Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), who was the sister of the artists Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore, some of whose pictures are also hung in the show. These 3 siblings had a famous uncle, Rabindranath Tagore, some of whose paintings were also on show. At the exhibition, there were portraits of Rabindranath Tagore by each of his above-mentioned relatives, and one by Jamini Roy.

Yet another artist on show, whom I had never encountered, is Qamrul Hassan (1921-1988), who was born later than the other artists. Born in Calcutta before independence and the Bangladesh War (1971), he died in what is now Bangladesh. He studied at The Government College of Art in Calcutta in the late 1930s, and afterwards became involved with left wing political activities as well as his art. Later, he was active in the struggle for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to become independent of what was then West Pakistan. Beneath one of his creations at the Brunei, there is a quotation by Qamrul about his style of painting:

“… where Jamini Roy ends , I begin …”

And this is so easy to see in the excellent exhibition at the Brunei Gallery

I have told you what stood out for me, but although I have highlighted a few things, the rest of the exhibits are wonderful, and not to be ‘sniffed at’. After seeing the show, I thought that never before had I seen such a fine and large collection of paintings by the liberated artists either here in the UK or in India. The curators of this show deserve hearty congratulations.